Joan Didion Quotes - Page 10

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• Sometimes I'll be fifty, sixty pages into something and I'll still be calling a character "X." I don't have a very clear idea of who the characters are until they start talking. Then I start to love them. By the time I finish the book, I love them so much that I want to stay with them. I don't want to leave them ever.

  Joan Didion

  Book, Character, Talking

  FaceBook post by Joan Didion from Dec 09, 2012

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• We were that generation called silent, but we were silent neither, as some thought, because we shared the period's official optimism nor, as others thought, because we feared its official repression. We were silent because the exhilaration of social action seemed to many of us just one more way of escaping the personal, of masking for a while that dread of the meaningless which was man's fate.

  Joan Didion

  Fate, Men, Escaping

  FaceBook post by Joan Didion from Aug 24, 2011

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• I don't lead a writer's life. And I think that can be a source of suspicion and irritation to some people.

  Joan Didion

  Thinking, Irritation, People

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• Nothing I read about grief seemed to exactly express the craziness of it; which was the interesting aspect of it to me - how really tenuous our sanity is.

  Joan Didion

  Grief, Interesting, Sanity

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• Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception. The tricks that work on others count for nothing in that very well-lit back alley where one keeps assignation with oneself: no winning smiles will do here, no prettily drawn lists of good intentions. One shuffles flashily but in vain through one's marked cards- the kindness done for the wrong reason, the apparent triumph which involved no real effort, the seemingly heroic act into which one had been shamed.

  Joan Didion

  Kindness, Real, Winning

  Joan Didion (1968). “Slouching towards Bethlehem”

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• We all have the same dreams.

  Joan Didion

  Dream

  Joan Didion (2011). “A Book of Common Prayer”, p.57, Vintage

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• any compulsion tries to justify itself.

  Joan Didion

  Trying, Inexplicable, Compulsion

  Joan Didion (2013). “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”, p.98, Zola Books

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• As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs...The way I write is who I am, or have become.

  Joan Didion

  Children, Writing, Who I Am

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• ...quite simply, I was in love with New York. I do not mean “love” in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you never love anyone quite that way again. I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out out of the West and reached the mirage.

  Joan Didion

  New York, Spring, Twilight

  Joan Didion (2006). “We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction”, Everyman's Library

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• And I have learned now to live with it, learned when to expect it, how to outwit it, even how to regard it, when it does come, as more friend than lodger. We have reached a certain understanding, my migraine and I.

  Joan Didion

  Pain, Understanding, Doe

  Joan Didion (2006). “We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction”, Everyman's Library

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• Of course great hotels have always been social ideas, flawless mirrors to the particular societies they service.

  Joan Didion

  Mirrors, Ideas, Flawless

  Joan Didion (2013). “The White Album”, p.91, Zola Books

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• My first notebook was a Big Five tablet, given to me [at age five] by my mother with the sensible suggestion that I stop whining and learn to amuse myself by writing down my thoughts.

  Joan Didion

  Notebook, Mother, Writing

  Joan Didion (2006). “We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction”, Everyman's Library

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• When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something... but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, that is when we join the fashionable madmen.

  Joan Didion

  Thinking, Want Something, Moral

  FaceBook post by Joan Didion from Apr 18, 2013

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• What you're normally doing as a writer is trying to find the narrative.

  Joan Didion

  Trying, Narrative

  Interview with Sheila Heti, www.believermag.com. December, 2011.

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• Writing is always a way, for me, of coming to some sort of understanding that I can't reach otherwise.It forces you to think. It forces you to work the thing through. Nothing comes to us out of the blue, very easily.

  Joan Didion

  Writing, Thinking, Blue

  Interview with Sheila Heti, www.believermag.com. December, 2011.

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• If you want to understand what you're thinking, you kind of have to work it through and write it. And the only way to work it through, for me, is to write it.

  Joan Didion

  Writing, Thinking, Want

  Interview with Sheila Heti, www.believermag.com. December, 2011.

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• There must be times when everybody writes when they feel they're evading writing.

  Joan Didion

  Writing, Feels

  Interview with Sheila Heti, www.believermag.com. December, 2011.

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• Once in a while there were things in screenwriting that taught me things for fiction. But there's nothing in screenwriting that teaches you anything for the theater. I'm not sure I've ever fully appreciated before how different a form theater is.

  Joan Didion

  Different, Appreciated, Teach

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Becoming a parent is actually terrifying. A lot of people have that feeling about their dogs. And if you're the kind of person who's going to have that feeling about a dog you're definitely going to have that about a child.

  Joan Didion

  Dog, Children, People

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• It's hard to find a book that's safe to write. Because one always goes to dark or difficult places.

  Joan Didion

  Book, Writing, Dark

  Source: www.believermag.com

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• Something I've always known about the screen is that if it's anything in the world, it's literal. It's so literal that there's a whole lot you can't do because you're stuck with the literalness of the screen. The stage is not literal.

  Joan Didion

  World, Stage, Stuck

  "Seeing Things Straight". Interview by Gibson Fay-LeBlanc, www.guernicamag.com. April 15, 2006.

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• I have an investment in not being crazy. I have a real investment in seeing things straight. This runs counter to that investment, so it required giving up an idea of myself, the idea being that I had control.

  Joan Didion

  Running, Giving Up, Crazy

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• You think you have some stable talent which will show no matter what you're writing, and if it doesn't seem to be getting across to the audience once, you can't imagine that moment when it suddenly will.

  Joan Didion

  Writing, Thinking, Matter

  Interview with Sheila Heti, www.believermag.com. December, 2011.

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• I was relying on a kind of natural transition - the transitions made by someone who is slightly deranged.

  Joan Didion

  Kind, Natural, Deranged

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Discovery still happens in the writing. You start in nonfiction with a whole lot more going for you, because all the discovery isn't waiting to be made. You've made some of it in the research. As you get deeper into a piece and do more research, the notes are in the direction of the piece - you're actually writing it.

  Joan Didion

  Writing, Waiting

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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